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Erin Kathleen on crafting a thriller based on a serial killer whose attacks really happened just miles from her childhood home.
By Danny Munso
Erin Kathleen was only 8 when a serial killer began terrorizing her neighborhood. Kathleen grew up in Delaware, right along U.S. Route 40, a highway that stretches from Utah to New Jersey and covers Delaware for a little over 17 miles. From November 1987 to September 1988, it was the hunting ground for Steven Brian Pennell, who targeted mainly sex workers and claimed the lives of five women. “He is burned into my psyche,” Kathleen says. “I used to ride my bike down to Route 40 and see if I could catch a glimpse of his blue van. It was the same way that people become obsessed with true crime. There’s something about the darkness that gives us a sense of control. If we could just catch him or figure out who he is, it’ll stop and we’ll have power over our universe again.”
Despite her personal connection to the events, Kathleen was resistant to revisit them in a script. “I really didn’t want to write about him,” she says. “I didn’t want to do a serial killer movie in which the killer was this charismatic sexy guy we just can’t look away from. In fact, I didn’t want [my script] to be focused on him at all. That’s why it took me a while. But I needed to get him out of my brain in some way.” Two works would serve as inspiration in helping find her way into the Pennell story: David Fincher’s 2007 film Zodiac and the late Michelle McNamara’s 2018 book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, in which the author tracked her own personal investigation into the Golden State Killer. “[They both] have this citizen detective aspect. We now have entire Reddit boards dedicated to cold cases where people with time on their hands figure things out in a way that cops don’t have. People are really smart, so I kind of wanted to do this citizen detective angle without giving the serial killer sex appeal, and that’s when the story took shape for me.” The resulting script, The Women of Route 40, follows Pam, a struggling single mother who works right off Route 40. After an old friend falls victim to a local serial killer, Pam teams up with Miles, a detective desperate to find the criminal, and the pair devise a plan for Pam to go undercover as a sex worker in an attempt to catch him.
Kathleen decided before starting that she would not name real victims and certain details of the old case in her script. “I told myself I wasn’t telling that story,” she says. “I’m telling a story inspired by my own fear and my own life experiences as the 8-year-old who lived along Route 40. That being said, I’m using real people and there are real people’s names in there. Steven Pennell’s name is real. The circumstances of the case are real, but the details I used are strictly about the investigation. I didn’t want to use the real victims’ names while inventing other parts of the story. So I like to say the script is inspired by this story but is not this story, and it’s really me grappling with my own feelings of what went on during that time when I was a young girl.” To make this clear to the reader, the final page of the script features a dedication to Pennell’s actual victims, complete with their names.
The Women of Route 40 is no boilerplate thriller. It is a deep rumination on misogyny, both personal and societal. Kathleen recalls the days of the case when the discourse was populated with disrespect for Pennell’s victims because they were sex workers. “When I was growing up, there was this talk of, ‘Oh, it’s just those women,’ as though they didn’t matter as much. I remember thinking, People are still dying. But that was the attitude, and that still is the attitude with sex workers that are killed. I definitely wanted to explore aspects of these communities that get terrorized that nobody ever talks about or people look down upon.” Part of the exploration involves Pam’s own past. We discover as the script goes on that she herself used to be a sex worker and is actively ashamed of what she did, trying desperately to hide the truth from her teenage daughter, Nikki. The script underscores that it’s just not men in the story actively dismissing these women because of what they do — Pam even does it herself.
This comes to a head during Pam’s final confrontation with Pennell, where he spits at her about women, saying, “You are all the same.” For the writer, the venom is warranted. “[Pam] has internalized her misogyny,” Kathleen says. “I love stories where the protagonist and antagonist share something and see something in each other. When he says that with disgust, she realizes she sees herself as different, above and better because she got out of something. She’s always been striving to push the past away. The moment she realizes, No, we’re all the same, is this sort of beautiful moment of her putting a stop to her own misogyny, her own self-hate. I really wanted to explore that aspect where it was embodied in one person that she hated what she had to do but that’s also what makes her human. You have to reconcile all sides of yourself even if it makes you squeamish.”
Pam’s evolution as a character is brilliantly charted through a series of three scenes where she confesses her sins to the local priest. In the first couple sessions, she is craving guidance. “I wanted Pam to be seeking acceptance from the patriarchy,” Kathleen says. “I wanted her seeking answers to these questions and expecting a response that satisfied, even if there almost never was.” The third scene occurs after Pam has come to terms with her past, even confessing it in confidence. When the priest addresses her as “child,” Pam opens his door and discovers he is in his early 20s. “I could be your mother,” she says to him. “There’s something in that scene where she takes back power for herself,” Kathleen continues. “It’s the patriarchy versus the matriarchy. The priest is no longer the person who has the answers. It’s her, and it’s always been her.”
Kathleen’s writing process for Route 40 began with penning a mini treatment and outline by hand before moving on to the draft stage, though she admits that process can only take her so far. “I will be perfectly honest,” she says. “There comes a point in the outline process where I can’t go on without getting to know the characters more, and the only way for me to do that is to start writing the script. I want to hear their voices and see how they act on the page, so the treatment is my segue into the script.” For the writing of this script and all previous ones, she cops to a bad habit where she fixates on getting scenes picture-perfect in the first draft, even if she needs to keep refining them over and over again before moving on. “It’s a really bad habit. I would just sit in front of the computer and make sure the page was as perfect as possible. It’s torturous.” This part of her process has changed in the last year due to a major life event: motherhood. With less time to devote to writing, Kathleen has found a way of working that maximizes her productivity. “One of the things that’s changed for me with being a. mother is you become a bit of a time ninja. Having a baby makes me say, ‘I’m sitting down and getting something out. Even if I write one page a day, that’s okay.’ So that’s what I do every night. Sometimes it’s painful, but my day feels complete when I get some writing done. I did not used to write every day. I would write when the mood struck, so that’s been the biggest change for me. Writing has become an act rather than something abstract.” This evolution has also removed the pressure of trying to make every scene perfect at the outset. “I’m so glad I don’t do that anymore because I see now that I can get a lot more joy out of writing if I stop trying to be perfect the first time out and let the first draft be the first draft.”
The Women of Route 40 landing on the 2020 Black List was the culmination – so far – of a career aspiring writers should look to with both inspiration and admiration. Kathleen finished grad school at Emerson in 2002 ready to start her career as a screenwriter, but she wound up working in book publishing and then moved to a career in copywriting, all while working on scripts in her spare time. Juggling a full-time job while chasing your dream as a working writer are two things that often don’t fit well together. “There would be times I would put it down because it’s hard to balance the two very well,” she says. “Plus, I was writing for no one except me and my writers’ group. There’s definitely been times it’s been a slog and you do question whether you should still be doing this. You question whether it’s the right thing. Sometimes it’s tiring balancing that life.” It took more than a decade until her career hit an inflection point when her 2013 script Lost Children became a finalist in the Academy’s Nicholl competition. With that first taste of success, she landed representation with Jennifer Au, who is still her manager today. She signed with the Gersh Agency in 2016 and now seems on the verge of something significant. Her TV pilot Dark Irish won CineStory’s Feature Retreat & Fellowship Competition for dramas in 2020, and in August of that year — a few months before it would make the Black List — Route 40 garnered major interest from several production companies.
It was a life-changing moment in more ways than one, as Kathleen went from meeting to meeting while eight months pregnant. She reached an agreement with screenwriter David S. Goyer’s Phantom Four Films, and they are meeting with directors now in hopes of taking the film out to studios relatively soon. While it would have been easy at times to walk away, Kathleen’s dedication to her dream appears ready to be rewarded, and it’s a lesson all writers should heed. ‘You have to stay really motivated and have that perseverance,” she says. “You have to be satisfied with the process, not the outcome, and that’s so hard because the outcome is you get a movie made. That’s what everyone wants, but you have to take joy from the process itself because it’s the only thing that can sustain you. You have no control over what happens after that.”
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